The Scream

Just because you said things have got to change

They won’t go away

Nothing goes away

Not unless you do the things you promised to

So walk the way you talk and talk the way you walk

- Dionne Warwick

Adam scanned the figures. He then connected the financial statements, pulled out a forecast and ran off some valuation metrics. The numbers checked. Helen would be pleased. But a coffee made more sense now. He walked the aisle to the coffee station, welled by the clamour of his colleagues — the rise and fall of their expectation.

He placed a Lugano coffee capsule in the machine, pulled the lever to puncture its film and hot steam shot through the grains returning something bitter. His senses sharpened and narrowed in on the machine till the noise behind him became a low frequency hum.

Adam turned and strode over to his line manager. “Helen, are you busy or could we have a quick chat?”

“No, let’s chat. What’s up?” Helen replied.

“I think,” Adam started, “I’m going to leave the company.”

Helen took a deep breath and looked relaxed. “Why?”

“I need some time off, no maybe, I need a permanent break. I just know I need to get out of here. This afternoon.”

“Good”, said Helen, raising her eyes brows, “Go on. Fulfil yourself, get a massage, get a happy ending, go for a walk, sing a song. You deserve a break, even a permanent one.”

Adam was caught by the endorsement, and was surprised that, however paternalistically, Helen empathised with his decision. Resoluteness to leave subsided for uncertainty about where to go and what to do.

“So, you’re not annoyed…what do you really think I should do?” He asked, like someone pawing in the dark for the light switch, prodding hesitantly for pointers from the lady whose blood curdling cries had relegated all but a few of the company’s cock swingers to antiquity, whose sales pitches regularly headlocked clients into doubling their spend, and whose views carried as much weight as the entire company’s board.

“As I said. Go to the zoo. Relax. Go on a date. Spend some of the money you’ve earned. You’re a good looking guy. I’d love to do that. Let it all go for a bit and feel the flow.” Helen then giggled to herself, perhaps imagining short-lived fantasies.

Adam realised Helen didn’t really think he was leaving. She was toying with his confusion. Her words were light-touch, really, offering hollow empathy, cajoling him into a short break, safe in the knowledge he would be back on Monday. Did she think he was just one ejaculation short of stability? His mind just one tete a tete with a parakeet at the local zoo short of righting itself and continuing course…?

“No, Helen, I’m leaving the company. I’m leaving for good, not coming back. I’m not just taking the day off to let off steam. I’m saying ‘Fuck it’ and I’m walking out the door. I’m doing that thing.”

The outburst had caught the attention of a section of the room outside her office and colleagues became overly fixated on their screens, screwing their faces in concentration to mask their pointed eavesdropping.

“Sorry, Adam, I just don’t believe you’re leaving. I’ll see you on Monday.”

Adam shook his head, left Helen’s office, grabbed his jacket from his desk and had buzzed himself out the building in thirty seconds. Soon he was striding down the street, past the sandwicheries, the past cafés, passing over the grates under which the Victorian sewers oozed along in funereally slow procession.

He refused himself the bus, preferring to walk to the steady patter of the rain. And he walked all the way to where he had to, stepping onto a vacant carriage of a train, where he settled with an arm stretched across the empty seat next to him and turned to look out the window at London’s lonely grey horizon.

From the elevated train’s window, he watched London’s cranes bent over the city’s divided lines, deep-set, hoisting up girders to cast heavy shadows that silently bludgeoned the heads of walkers beneath who only looked straight, or down. Why would they look up? Out the window — stone, concrete, glass and carbon sepulchres rising out of the densest pockets of the city, where you could still get lost in alleys, if you were romantically inclined. Adam scanned east to west, north to the south. He smiled. To the east, he saw poets reclined on slate rooves painting their mind’s eye, crying watercolour lines of memory onto the city whose invisible contours converged to frustrate. They would lie and cry forever. To the north, he saw the tops of London’s city villages, rising up to crop the trees and back away from the centre on tip toe. And to the west he saw the hanging mansions and apartments where the global citizenry enjoyed space and quality amidst the tar shells of buildings which had met similar fates in their escape. And to the south, he looked through the opposite carriage window, and saw the ranked rows of brick houses which seemed to house everyone. His eyelids finally fell and he was carried asleep above the grey city, arch after arch, until the train reached the greener bounds of the southwest.

Adam woke instinctively as the train slowed and walked dazed to a detached house on his quiet street. The house was larger than his needs. He opened the door and paused in the hallway, unsure of his next move. No action seemed right — he remembered the moment he’d had at the coffee machine earlier that day. He remembered how he felt such surety to leave. To hesitate now would be to undo that moment which seemed quite significant because of its spontaneity. He packed a bag, found a roadmap which he duly studied before giving up the act. He would go somewhere, he would pick a spot and go. Two nights somewhere with a roof. Somewhere necessitating a drive longer than was enjoyable. Somewhere he could outlive a bad decision if he needed to. With a few clothes dashed in an overnight bag, Adam left and drove west from his home.

His car had a soft front wheel tyre which dragged the car to the right and drubbed the cats’ eyes drum-like. Adam hadn’t settled on a destination when he left; instead, he followed a vague westerly direction, on a sporadic beat, joining and exiting junctions as and when he fancied it, creeping through hamlets on A-roads. Yet everything was still familiar. Three hours driving, and he knew the names of these towns. This land is small. There isn’t much space to retreat and our proximity to one another necessitates the greatest form of dissimulation. Further on.

Four hours in, it was dark, and he was running along the north border between Somerset and Herefordshire. Curving around a bend, the car’s headlights lit up a sign — Tocdid, three kilometres away. Now that was a name he didn’t recognise. He would go there. Adam pressed down on the pedal round a bend and sent up settled leaves into a momentary waltz. His car shot through trees which had clasped over the road like planning hands. To an observer, the car was like a ball of light sucked through a tube in a vacuum, accelerating to fill space on an indeterminate line in the dark. He came out onto a crest and finally followed a slow zigzagging road down into the village.

He passed “Welcome to Tocdid” — a sign which didn’t list any twins. At the foot of the hill was a long road lined by fifty houses on either side. Adam was struck by their uniformity: the identical size, the squat demeanour, the regimented garden paths, the burgundy front doors. He hunched over the wheel and looked above the rooftops for a spire, but there didn’t seem to be village church here either. He rolled along until the road finished and became a common, in the middle of which was a solitary bench. The village was a cul-de-sac, a one road-in dead-end. Yet he supposed it was the kind of isolated place he’d been looking for. He turned and drove back down the street. Now on one side, a woman took out a bin bag; on another, a man exited his door to walk a small border terrier. Men, women doing things, mechanical in their emergence, as if they were part of a well-tuned cabinet of track curiosities, appearing and receding on the clock. It was a Friday evening, at least the place was moving, he thought.

Just off Tocdid’s main artery, Adam caught the hanging board of a pub: The Red Inn. He brought the car to a stop outside and entered. The pub only had one entrance and it opened into a long room, a rectangular thirty by ten, the bar near the door, a raised stage the other end. Save the few people he’d seen along the street; it seemed the whole town was inside. Nobody took notice of him. They sat on low stools, huddled tight and were laughing loudly, throwing jokes at the landlord, who seemed to be well-known and kept his own lukewarm ale on the counter. It was small-town stuff, and it was cheerful. A poster above the bar read “Lucy and the Light Bringers: 9.00pm — 10.30pm”. Adam left the main room through a side door into a narrow corridor where there was a small reception desk. Sat there was a lady he supposed was the wife of the landlord.

“Good evening. I’m sorry it’s such short notice but I don’t suppose it’s possible to rent a room tonight is it?”

She opened the ledger book, flicked to the date, an empty page of no bookings.

“We should be able to fit you in”, she said wryly and winked.

“Great,” Adam smiled back.

She gave him a key inscribed “Roane” and pointed him up the stairs to a second door on the left.

In the room, he lost his jacket, unbuckled his trousers, slid his belt out, and fell back onto the bed where he lay looking up, eyes peeled wide, breathing deeply.

He showered and fragranced himself with the small amount of toiletries he’d remembered to bring with him. He looked in the mirror and was pleased with how he looked, so he smiled and feigned a few boxing jabs into it.

Just shy of nine pm, Adam walked downstairs to see the main room had filled up further. He bought a jar of warm ale with a frothy head as thick as he’d ever seen, and wandered to a free table with a single stool. Facing the stage, he waited for “Lucy and the Light Bringers”. A gaunt man was already on; he wasn’t much older than a boy. He wore a long plaid shirt on light grey corduroys and his face was partly curtained by straggly orange hair, the skin that did show had a sickly balm. The man loped around the stage connecting cables, tinkering instruments into tune, hopping side to side like a circus animal on a leash playing its role, grimacing, and murmuring to himself. Adam observed his disjointed yellow teeth and the glint of a gold cap deep in the mouth. He also saw how his cheek bones sunk his eyes, and how his hair lapped over them in a viscous orange. He followed the pantomime till he finished the last drops of his jar and got up to to buy another but the barman was already on his way over with one freshly poured.

“Table service?” Adam smiled.

“I could see you needed another one. Tocdid hospitality.”

“Very kind indeed — when’s the band starting by the way?”

“Any minute. Looks like she’s coming now,” replied the landlord, turning Adam’s shoulders to the stage with trustful paddy hands. A lady appeared. Her head was slightly bowed, from it hung deep red ribbons of hair which undulated over the contours of her face and met the white frills of a loose shirt. Adam followed the soft shirt till it was contradicted by dark denim trousers, coarsening further onto unremitting thigh-height boots. Adam looked down to see his beer’s foamy head spilling over his clamped hand.

Christ me, Adam whispered to himself as he took his stool again. She looked like Geena Davis’s Morgan Adams from Cutthroat Island. Cutlass and corset. Fear and beauty — the intoxicating mix that had formed the very basis of everything which had ever been created.

She swayed slowly while the ginger pet busied on the last remaining cables that would give her sound. She swayed to the trees outside the window even though she couldn’t see them. She swayed to a song though nothing played. One hip rose as one fell, a cadence which tightened and loosened the denim on her leg. Adam shifted about.

More locals from the area seemed to have joined and soon all stools had been taken. The pub absorbed the village and bulged at its seams. It was curious, Adam thought, that a seemingly unknown travelling duo could pull this many people on a Friday night.

With the last cable connected and the pitch dialled to the correct level, the gaunt companion nodded and bowed to the lady in a show of obeisance and loped back to sit at a piano.

The pub quietened as he hovered his fingers over the keys. The pub waited, silent and baited.

The lady’s fingers clicked.

His hands dropped onto the piano and moved up its keys caressingly, his fingers seeking ethereal scales, sending out hanging pitches, invitations to sing.

Her lips met the microphone to part high notes, quivering in their release. Soft folkish notes betraying her hard appearance, sounding like the voice of a girl whose adolescence has been spent trapped with the scrawls in her attic room, in a village where only the whispers of local intrigue are the bases for songs. She sang a high pitch. Occasionally she pulled her chin back to produce lower and more threatening notes. And her body still swayed as she sung. No one in the pub moved, no one in the pub spoke.

Offering outstretched palms now, her voice would catch wandering streams of indeterminate piano melodies, stirring in the audience feelings of nostalgia and homesickness. For Adam, filmic imagery of the ocean, lovers’ complaints, toxic regret, and blind hopefulness. He also felt the desire to move in tandem with her.

Fuck me, Adam whispered, leaning back to look sideways for the reaction of others. The crowd was motionless, holding out its admiring gaze to her like a lambent flame.

She elided between songs without a nod to her companion who seemed tied to the invisible chains of her lead. Adam too felt chained. Chained but weightless, experiencing the most indulgent reverie he could find in his mind, but still increasingly concerned that the enjoyable patterns firing off in his brain may end up as cul-de-sacs.

The piano finally slowed into a discernible loop, and Lucy’s voice lifted above it:

…Oh my dreams are made of ghost skins
when I wake up in my dark places
and I reeeeeaaaaach for the messy faces
that take me dooooowwwwn to my favourite ride
…ohhhhhhh I am blossoming down
and I stayyyyyy down here
when dreams cloud my miiiiiinddd
to take me away this tiiiiiime
you know I walk the streets of gold and I
can’t find my baby’s bones
it was two flukes of the nooooossssseeee…

The pianist tapped the last key, and let it hang with the pedal. She sent one last note out, a delicate note the pub strained to hear. She held it for as long as possible, eliciting the deepest silence yet from the crowd who sought to prolong it. The note did fade. Lucy bowed her head. The crowd broke into applause and high pitched woops. Lucy gave an embarrassed smile, bringing her arms into her body, clasping her hands around her mouth, shying away from the microphone she ad just mastered. All her dramatic intimacy giving way to humble distance, so, Lucy transitioned from queen to subject. The pub loved her. Adam too.

Was she a regular here? Was it usual for the entire village to turn up to her gigs?

Adam turned to ask the couple next to him. They shook their heads.

“Never seen her, never heard of her. Someone said she’s a travelling musician and was passing through the village”

“But this village doesn’t have a pass through. You have to mean to come here.”

“Maybe she got lost on her way somewhere else” they shrugged.

The duo packed away the microphone and the keyboard while the pub resumed its general level of noise and its patrons queued again for lagers and glasses of white wine. As Adam watched her zipping up the keyboard case, Lucy turned and shot a glance at him. She smiled. He smiled. She stepped down from the stage and began to weave her way through the busy room, delicately moving large shouldered men apart with featherlike touches from her hand. Adam shifted awkwardly. She was now yards away. She was coming towards him.

Fuck, she’s going to talk to me. Adam’s mind panicked. No extra stools, she can’t.

Lucy stood in front of him. Adam walked his eyes up her. The hard boots, the coarse denim, the unbuttoned shirt, and the red hair. She shot a glance to the couple beside Adam, who abruptly took their leave.

“Well, that performance was one of the worst I’ve seen” Adam mustered humour in discomfort.

“Oh was it indeed”, raising her eyebrows, “may I sit?”

“Please.” Adam said and motioned to the empty seat that she had procured herself a moment earlier, rather easily, he noted too.

“You don’t look or sound like the regulars, where are you from?”

“London. My name’s Adam.”

“Lucy. What are you doing here?”

“Just a weekend break, I quit my job”

“That was a rash thing to do… are you rash?”

Adam smiled. “Not normally and I don’t know why I did it. It was just a normal day at work in a job that I actually quite enjoy…”

“…and is the job part of a world that you enjoy too?”

“You mean am I content?”

“No, do you enjoy the world?”

“I have no idea what that means”

“You see Adam, I enjoy the world and I move through, giving and taking everything from it,” and as she said this, she leaned back, closed her eyes, and snaked her hips side to side, laughing. An action Adam chose to ignore.

“So do you play here regularly? You pulled out a serious crowd.” He could only summon a patter of inoffensive dialogue.

“No, never. I travel Adam, all over. Today I came through and the landlord seemed only too pleased to have us, even provided a free room.”

“You say came through but this place only has one road leading to it. You have to mean to come here.”

“Okay, Adam, I came for you,” patting his hands mockingly. Her iris were the darkest brown, barely distinguishable from her pupils in the dimly lit pub. “So Adam, what did you want by coming all the way here tonight?”

“I suppose I wanted a break, to clear my head”

“Go on”

“I mean…that performance…I’ve never seen anything like it…the voice, the melody, how you pitched it — you and your friend work well. He’s very deferential to you on stage”

And as Adam said this, he scanned the room for the gaunt ginger figure, making him out momentarily sat in the corner, staring vacantly in their direction.

“He understands what I need, and plus he owes me.” Lucy followed Adam’s gaze towards her companion as she spoke.

“What does he owe you?”

“He’s indebted because I’ve shown him the world.”

“So, you’ve toured a lot?” Adam chose sensible readings, edging back from the precipice of some greater revelation that would cause him to fall perhaps forever, if he dared to probe.

“Yes, we’ve travelled very far, Adam. In fact you can see our friend in the corner is tired from it all — I’m not sure he has much left to be honest.”

“There’s great chemistry between you two. I mean where did you get to put out music like that. It’s a mystery Lucy. I wanted to be in that song with you there”

“Oh but Adam, you can’t, it won’t work, you need to be raised in dirt”

“What?”

She ignored him, pulled his coat’s lapel toward her, and kissed his trembling lips.

They parted company and he left to go to bed, thoroughly drunk, picking up the key from reception before muddling his way upstairs, leaning hard into the banister as he climbed. Once inside his room, he slipped into bed and welcomed the warmth of it and thought of the trees that still swayed outside, pulling further from their roots.

Elsewhere two bodies entered their own room, unrobed and scolded each other in an unknown language. Their exchange found muffled routes into the room of Adam, who heaved large breaths and absorbed the indecipherable sounds. He grew tired, very tired and had to lie on his bed; his breath slowed to an inaudible rise and fall.

Hours passed.

Adam felt breath on his face. His eyes flickered. Through the blur slowly crystallised two eyes hovering an inch from his own. Dilated pupils like bottomless wells carved into ice. He made to move his limbs but was held down. He recognised the face that looked at him. He recognised the force that kept him fixed. The eyes withdrew and a body reared up, a figure scarcely distinguishable in the dark. Adam tried to push himself up, but his palms could not press down on the mattress, there was no energy in them. Pinned, his eyes tried to define the figure standing in front of him. It stood there, tall, thin, with arms like a human, legs like a human, a head like a human. The figure offered its hand, beckoning Adam up with raspy fingers which seemed to grate the air between them. Adam could suddenly push himself up. He shifted off the bed nervously to stand two metres apart, locked in gaze with each other. Adam looked at the figure properly.

A man. A grin carving his face. Awful cavernous eyes. Sticky grey skin, ageing by the second. He turned from Adam and motioned to follow. Adam did not follow unwillingly. Controlled and unpanicked, he stepped after the man out of his room into the amber-lit hallway and down the staircase. As they descended, the man turned and grinned again. Under loose black drapes, the man’s gait was awkward and slow, his legs dragged forward by his long curved back leaning into the night.

They walked past the empty reception to outside. Adam in tow, the figure circled the pub, scraping the coarse brick of the wall with his shoulder until he reached the path that led through the beer garden toward trees in the distance. Powerlessness and yet utter control pushed Adam to follow him out of the faint glow of the pub into the darkness, under a sky without stars, and into a forest without end. Every few paces, the figure returned a grin to Adam.

In the black of the night, Adam soon could no longer make out the body in front of him. He followed only the sound of his shuffle. On and on and on till at least he heard the man’s footsteps stop. Adam believed he had turned to face him. He felt the pressure of the gaze and maybe could even see the white of a grin floating in the dark.

Adam had not felt any fear. He had followed willingly. He had not questioned. He had not even felt the cold of the night against the nakedness of his body and the passage had felt comfortable, almost inevitable. Adam smiled at where he imagined the figure was. And as he smiled, he began to feel cold. A sensation of water dropping into his stomach. Something seeping deep from his mind, dropping deep into his core, echoing its way down into the bottomless pit of his stomach, drop by drop, until those drops became a stream and filled his insides entirely with cold. The forest breeze that had previously seemed warm compounded now prickled cold against his rapidly tightening skin, which tightened so hard he felt it would tear. Adam’s feet started to slid over the ground, his body fixed and immobile. He was pulled past the figure, dragged by an unknown force, conscious that he was being taken to somewhere where something was waiting. His arms spread apart like a human crucifix hovering over the hard ground. The cold intensified inside him and soon it felt like a scream, shrill and piercing, rattling against the empty cage of his body. But, his lips were fastened and there was no outlet for the scream, so it remained inside. And he could not lower his feet to resist the pull. On he slid, carried towards a needle of light in the distance and towards an outline of something or someone against it.

The light grew larger as Adam approached. He shuddered uncontrollably, reeling from the sensation of teetering over some vertiginous edge, enticed to jump and yet tempered by a malicious power to remain. A power that could only have borne the name fear. The light grew larger still, emblazoned across his eyes, which were pinned ever wider for him to receive anything and everything he was due. He could not feel however the branches tear at his flesh as he was pulled through them. He could not feel the blood pattern his torso, forehead and arms. All he heard, felt, sensed was the scream inside of him, shrill and cold. He passed trees which rose like temple pillars to hold the night. An awful temple. And he could see the light was a fire now and he could see the figure was a woman. His body vibrated as he neared, and the scream grew louder. Only but a few metres now, his eyes could see it all. It was her. Her face. She smiled, welcoming him with pity in her eyes. Pity which burned like the flame behind her. She nodded gently with great empathy and his feet lowered onto the scorched moss. Adam collapsed. The scream within him ceased. She gave her hand and drew him up into healing embrace. His chin found the soft of her neck. She held him into her and whispered what could only be heard between them and then gently pushed him back while she held his hands, leading him into a momentary waltz around the fire. She drew Adam close and found the small of his neck and bit him. And as she pushed him apart she dug her nails into his wrists to pull him back into her. Then she caught his lip with her teeth and clamped down. He received it willingly. He did not wince as she moved him back and forth, taking pieces of him. And the figure stood above them on a ridge, slow capping the dance, a dance trivial to the ascent ahead, inconsequent to the inevitable fall.

“I’m so glad you came” she whispered. “So, so glad you came.” Her eyes changed; infernality giving way to meeker tones with every repetition. She pulled herself into him now and cried into his chest, shaking her head side to side.

“But no, no, no…” her muffled cries became denials and she lifted her hand and tapped her finger firmly on the round of his shoulder. She did this for some time. Manic oscillations of laughter, sadness, anger and lust into Adam’s chest, the totum of her display, upright and fixed, and completely receptive to her mockery and worship.

In her final act, she cupped his face with her hands and guided it so slowly to hers. She brought their lips to momentarily touch, then hesitated, withdrew an inch and screamed a scream which cut the night.

“Sir…sir…, are you alright?”

Adam lay in the middle of the village green. A woman knelt beside him shaking his shoulder.

Adam’s eyes opened to daylight and he looked down at his body, nude but for the woman’s chiffon scarf haphazardly lain over his cock. Her husband and a dog stood awkwardly some metres behind.

“I’m alright thank you” Adam stood up and she stepped back.

“Bit too much to drink last night? Looks like you’ve gone through thorns and what”

Adam couldn’t engage. He just looked over his marked body.

“Can I keep the scarf? I’m staying at the pub, I’ll leave with the landlord.”

“Yes, are you sure you’re alright?”

Adam started to walk away already and nodded thank you to them both. The scarf barely covered his bollocks or cheeks. He slipped between the row of houses footing the green and shuffled across Tocdid’s main road to let himself into the pub. He hurried upstairs past the landlord, who was slumped forward in a chair asleep, a cigarette burnt to the nub still in his fingers. Adam unlocked his room, doused his face with cold water before staggering into the shower. He emptied the complimentary gel and rubbed it over his body, pulling the lever clockwise until the head flowed hot and started to soften his marked body.

He scrubbed manically with the soap, digging the remnants of dirt out of his nails and out of his pores, and running his fingers through his hair repeatedly until it foamed white and the scent of smoke faded. Then rotating the valve, he waited for the cold water, heaving long breaths to suppress the shock, which in some way helped him start to forget the night, the man, the woman, the trees, the scream. He stood there for minutes, until the steam cleared, until his body crystallised in the mirror’s reflection, and until a last shudder under the water forced him out.

The digital clock beside the bed beeped. It was 8.00am. Adam scrambled his affairs, took a last look around the room for anything and left, stopping by the landlord, who had now risen and was drinking a cup of coffee.

“Leaving early?”

“Got to get back, unfortunately”

“How about that band then? Lucy was something else last night, wasn’t she?”

Adam stared at him. “She was staying here too wasn’t she?”

“That’s right. Left even earlier than you — woke me up wheeling their instruments out. But she’s always touring you see so she’ll be off to the next place.”

“It was quite something”

“Oh we enjoy it when someone makes the effort to come down here and perform. Not many do. A bit cut-off here, only one road in. But Lucy comes at least once a year and does a gig.”

“What do you know about her?”

“I know that I want to charge her every time for the room, but somehow she talks me out of it and I give it for free, and I pay her for the gig…She’s a musician and she tours the world.”

“How famous is she?”

“Oh I think rather famous, yes.”

“Can I pay?”

Adam paid and gave a final nod to the landlord before walking out of the main door; the landlord watched through the frosted glass as his shape slowly splintered and disappeared.

Stopping short of the car, Adam took out his phone and searched Lucy and the Lightbringers. He scrolled down, but there was no specific band under that name.

He drove calmly out of the village and glimpsed himself in the rear-view mirror but did not linger on his reflection. He held the wheel tight and kept his eyes on the whites of the road which led out of Tocdid to curve around coppices and the through green tunnels he had entered by. He drove without pause or diversion. After some hours, London reared unannounced, a growing density of buildings the only marker to its boundary. Adam’s eyes never left the tarmac, his car moved predictably, as if fixed to a rail, through familiar streets, halting and going with the monotonous ebb and flow of the city that was his home. He squeezed the car into its usual space between houses 9 and 13 and unlocked the door. The house was as he left it, silent and ordered. He took a glass of water and sat on his old Belgian brand sofa which had been suggested by a colleague. His eyelids fell, his muscles relaxed and he sunk into deep sleep.

Adam woke on Monday at 10.00am. He gathered his work clothes and undertook the all-too familiar route into work, where he duly arrived.

“Pathetic!” heckled Helen, her head jutting out the door. “All that chat for a Friday off…what a drama queen…what a drama queen”.

Adam turned and ushered Helen back into his office to continue the conversation without the floor hearing. But Helen continued.

“Your name was all over the Whatsapp groups. Adam’s lost it. He’s not coming back. Our star boy must’ve hated the job all along and hid it.”

“Yeah, look, I’m back and I suppose you’re right, I just needed the weekend off.”

“I mean you don’t look that well rested. You look tired, if a little beaten up Adam.”

“I feel fine. I’ve got my head straight.”

“Well, try not to overreact again.” Helen leant in earnestly. “I too have desires, disruptive desires. Ones which make me wish revert to rashness, to climb peaks and fall down them for the thrill, but…” she stepped back… ”but I’ve learned to tame them.” She winked, chuckled, and slapped Adam on the shoulder. “Get yourself a coffee”.

So he walked to the coffee machine. He took the ceramic espresso cup, paused and ran his thumb against its abrasive edge before placing it under the filter and inserting a capsule. The steam hissed through the coffee grains, growing louder until the sound of the rushing vapour penetrated Adam’s whole body, rattling it as if he was back in the forest. Screaming in him as if he was being lifted to be dropped. The viscous coffee dripped and the scream faded. Adam returned to his desk.